“The word ‘narcissus’ is linked inexorably with that of the beautiful boy Narcissus in Greek mythology, who was unaware of the intense love for him felt by the wood nymph Echo, who was cursed by being only able to repeat his last words. Eventually she pined away for him to such an extent that she became only a faint voice in the woods. As a revenge and punishment on Narcissus, Venus, the god of love, sent Cupid to cast a spell over him, so that he would fall in love with the first face he saw….
“What happened, of course, is that he leaned over a pool to drink and fell in love with his own image. Like Echo, he began to waste away with unrequited love, but the gods took pity on him, and turned him into a flower — a daffodil, probably Narcissus tazetta, which we know to have been grown in ancient Greece. Not surprisingly, daffodils came to symbolize both unrequited love and egotism in the Victorian language of flowers, and narcissism has come to mean a pathological sense of preening self-worth.”
Well, there you have it: Boy doesn’t meet nymph, dimly falls in love with his own reflection instead, gets bewitched into a flower, and is linked with a pathology for centuries. Keep his fate in mind next time a wood nymph tried to get your attention.
This is the second of four posts featuring my encounters with this spring’s daffodils. The first post is A Collection of Daffodils (1 of 4).
I’m a big fan of the varieties in the first five photos (and in the last five, with black backgrounds). The others, though, have a different sort of charm: each was a single daffodil standing on its own in an odd place, as certain daffodils like to do.
“Daffodils are somehow the quintessential spring flower. The appearance of their distinctive yellow blooms is a sure sign that winter has either ended or is about to soon….
“There are around twenty-seven thousand unique cultivars of daffodil. Unlike other flowers — roses, tulips, orchids, whose numbers of deliberately bred varieties range across great swathes of the spectrum or show off an extravagant range of shapes — daffodils are remarkably alike. All single cultivars have the same basic shape — a cup (also called a corona) and petals (although botanists do not call them petals); even the doubles or the strange ‘split-corona’ varieties easily betray their basic inheritance. Above all there is the colour, more or less every shade of yellow which can be imagined, but very little else: white of course, but then almost every flower has at least one white variant, some flashes of orange, but never very much, and that’s it; there are so-called pink varieties, but they are more of a tan-apricot. One of the fascinating things about daffodils is just how much play we can have with the same basic design and the same colour scheme, about how much breeders, the bulb trade, and we — the customers — keep on coming back for more….”
Every now and then I wonder why I’ve never gotten tired of taking photographs of plants, trees, and flowers. I tend to think about that when I realize that my photos of this year’s daffodils, for example, are not that much different from my photos of last year’s daffodils, or those from the year before… and also as spring and summer unfold and I know I’ll end out photographing plants in my own garden, all specimens I’ve photographed previously (along with a few newcomers and whatever else catches my camera’s eyes).
I seldom go back and look at previous photos in my collections, so often my only recognition of a newer photo’s similarity to a previous photo is in bits of memory, which is I guess where old photos reside anyway. But when I do take a look, there are always fun surprises: even though the textures and colors in nature are constantly changing, I can sometimes pinpoint that a photo taken today was of the same subject I took in the past, in the same approximate location, and maybe even the same time of day. The daffodils in this post appeared here previously in 2020 (see Spring 2020: March is for Daffodils (3 of 4), but I must have missed them in 2021. Just as they did in 2020, this year’s crop was growing behind a concrete wall, creating a nice diversion as their top-heavy blooms curved the stems against the stone for some soft-versus-hard contrast and some dark background drama. They’re the same, yet different: a singular characteristic of photography is that if often feels like you are seeing something for the first time, even when you’re not. Close-up or macro photography seems to intensify that experience: it takes only the slightest change in positioning the camera to create a distinctly alternate view of the same subject. And then, in post-processing, Lightroom’s nearly endless options for adjusting and enhancing colors, textures, and backgrounds seems to turn each photo into an event of its own.
I learned from Noel Kingsbury’s book about daffodils — quoted above — that the flowers featured in this post are a form of double-daffodil, their distinction consisting of a multitude of soft, overlapping petals (reminding me of tissue-paper flowers) and a center cup that’s less apparent than other daffodils (such as trumpet varieties). This particular variety is almost pure white — and, actually, in bright sunlight or from a distance they look like that — but close-up each clump of petals shows off swatches of contrasting light yellow or cream color toward their center.
“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again. And in later years a familiar scent brings it to mind.”
From a set of unprocessed March daffodil photos, I picked out a few that were backlit (or side-lit), posed and processed as I described last fall in Autumn Leaves / Autumn Light, the last five re-processed on black backgrounds. A little alien in a helmet swooped in and attached itself to the daffodil in the first two photos while I was shooting; aliens, apparently, like to hug daffodils. Who knew??
“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience…. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds….
“Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account — which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership — a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.
“Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
“Something becomes real… by being photographed. But a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation.“
“To designate a hell is not to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others….
“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.“
“A civilized person is one who is able, at all times and in all places, to recognize the humanity of others fully. So two stages have to be crossed before anyone can become civilized: in the first stage, you discover that others live in a way different from you; in the second, you agree to see them as bearers of the same humanity as yourself. The moral demand comes with an intellectual dimension: getting those with whom you live to understand a foreign identity, whether individual or collective, is an act of civilization, since in this way you are enlarging the circle of humanity.
“Thinking that yours is the only properly human group, refusing to acknowledge anything outside your own existence, offering nothing to others, and deliberately remaining shut away within your original milieu is a sign of barbarism; recognizing the plurality of groups, of human societies and cultures, and putting yourself on an equal footing with others is part of civilization….
“Torture, humiliation and suffering inflicted on others are marks of barbarity. The same is true of murder, and even more of collective murder or genocide, whatever may be the criterion by which you define the group that you desire to eliminate: `race’ (or visible physical characteristics), ethnic group, religion, social class or political convictions. Genocides were not a twentieth-century invention, but it cannot be denied that they lasted throughout the century — witness the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey, the `kulaks’ and the `bourgeois’ in Soviet Russia, the Jews and Gypsies in Nazi Germany, the inhabitants of the towns and cities in Cambodia, and the Tutsis in Rwanda….
‘Waging war is more barbaric than settling conflicts by negotiation….”
The world is changing before our very eyes.
That might have been a statement I could have made about the season — the first weeks of spring with green starting to bust out all around me — but since my last post (over a month ago, which I find hard to believe until I look at a calendar) the future histories of nations are being rewritten. And the first drafts of that rewrite are playing out on our media day and night, the seeds of geopolitical realignments that will change global politics, economics, and possibly even country borders before the war in Ukraine comes to an end.
It’s weirdly interesting to me that we often call our engagement with media consumption — “consumption” having archaically described “wasting diseases” like tuberculosis — yet that’s certainly one of the things that’s happening as endless videos and photographs of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fill our television screens and social networking feeds, as they have done for weeks. There’s a relentlessness to it that’s very nearly debilitating even when experienced as a remotely observed event, so that’s possibly why I found myself back in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, rereading it for the logic it attempts to provide around our interactions with conflict imagery. It’s impossible to capture the nuances from the book in a few quotes or a blog post, so I selected segments above from the beginning — which describes our positions as war spectators — and from the ending, which explains why all these images matter, and why we cannot look away.
Regarding the Pain of Others was published in 2003, and so doesn’t necessarily encapsulate the shocking immediacy of what we’re seeing from embattled Ukrainian cities, photographs and videos produced nearly as quickly as events are occurring and widely disseminated within minutes of (or even during) each occurrence. “Nonstop imagery” — as Sontag described it back then — is an even more apparent element of technological acceleration than it was when she wrote the book, which makes the book as relevant now as it was then, perhaps even moreso. We may feel like we’re experiencing the war as it’s occurring — and in media, we are — yet we’re actually only experiencing a representation of that war, because unless we’re there, that’s all we’ve got. It’s our own sense of empathy that fills in the gap between the imagery and the experience — when we recognize that others, as Todorov says, are “bearers of the same humanity” as ourselves, tinged, perhaps, with a bit of suppressed relief that “there but for the grace of god, go I.”
I’ve seen some articles on the internet that describe Russia’s attack on Ukraine as “the first social media war” — and while it’s not accurate to call it the first one, changes in technology (especially cell phones and their cameras, along with the explosive growth of social networks) have certainly infused this one with a visceral level of immediacy unlike conflict representations that any of us might have seen previously. Where words — especially superlatives — seem to fail, the photographs and videos coming out of Ukraine act as stand-ins for the words and for being there, except that being there means you can’t turn it off. Perhaps, like me, you’ve realized that you never really understood the obscene destructive power of weapons of war, of missiles flung across borders at a residential apartment buildings — until now.
It’s unnerving to realize that human beings are capable of such violence. It’s disturbing even as we’re surrounded by it, pummeled with its representations, or even when we’re just dimly aware of it. It’s almost inconceivable that these same creatures are capable creating anything worthwhile, and yet they are, and they do, as they have for millennia. I’m not sure why I always think about this (meaning, I’ve gotten used to it and have never tried to figure it out), but I always find myself simultaneously saddened and enraged not only by war’s loss of life but at the creative human potential that is destroyed by other humans. While I don’t expect it to make sense, I naively want it… to make sense….
Last week, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy appeared in a speech to the U.S. Congress, in which he included a video of Ukrainian cities that started out like a travelogue then shifted to images of the damage being done to those same cities. As he did with a previous speech to the Canadian Parliament, Zelenskyy used words (and images) as a way to urge empathy: Imagine, if you will, that this is happening to you.
The full U.S. Congress speech is here; you can skip to the portion I’m referring to by clicking here. It is difficult to watch, but should be watched, and must be witnessed.
Setting the context and content aside for a moment (I know that’s not really possible), the video is powerful in its message, even moreso because of its juxtaposition of before-and-after scenes that drive its point home… accompanied by an intensely emotional melody that I had never heard before. It evoked some memories of music I was familiar with, possibly a somber Vivaldi larghetto (like this, for example), or maybe something dark from Rachmaninoff, or maybe the theme music from the movie Schindler’s List. It took me a few days to track it down, but the music in the video was written by Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk, and the piece is simply and delightfully called… Melody.
There are quite a few performances of Melody on Youtube (see also here and here); but this is the one I liked the most, by Ukrainian violinist Anastasiya Petryshak:
It goes without saying, I suppose: but may the sounds of Ukrainian violins smother the haunting screams of air-raid sirens, as soon as is humanly possible.
“There are daffodils in February, or even in January on rare occasions when the little early trumpet or ‘February Gold’ show a flower or two; the various kinds bloom on until the middle of April or later.”
“In China, favorite garden flowers are treasured for their symbolic meanings in art, literature, and society…. Flowering plums represent happiness and friendships.”
Hello!
Below are some photos of a small batch of late winter, early spring, mid-February daffodils (most found in the sun but shielded from cold breezes by nearby tree trunks), and some flowers on a blossoming plum tree.
